About the Tschumi Pavilion

The origins

The Tschumi Pavilion was designed by the French-Swiss architect, Bernard Tschumi, who is based in Paris and New York. It was built in 1990 as part of the What a Wonderful World! exhibition. Music Videos in Architecture. The aim of the exhibition was to explore both the connection and the boundaries between art, visual culture, architecture and public space. The exhibition celebrated the 950th anniversary of the City of Groningen and was held in five pavilions. The five architects who were rechristened ‘deconstructivists’ in 1988, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, CoopHimmelb(l)au, Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas, were asked to investigate the view of the city and the quality of the public space in an innovative way.

The assignment

The basic idea behind building the pavilions was to present video clips, which, after 100 years of film, were considered to be the latest form of this medium. The architects were tasked with creating a suitable environment for the video clip, not at living room level, but at city scale. What’s more, the architects were asked whether this assignment should lead to a new building type, or whether the phenomenon of the video clip could nurture a fundamentally different approach to architecture.

Form versus function

The critical examination of the relationship between form and function is at the heart of Bernard Tschumi’s work. The fact that his Pavilion is still in use, albeit with a modified and updated programme, is significant. Not only has the ‘glass gallery’ proved capable of establishing a direct relationship between the originally situated video clips, the architecture itself and public space; the Pavilion has also confirmed, as Tschumi has always maintained, that architectural logic is not just dependent on its programmatic basis, but on the basis of its own merits is capable of accommodating more and more new urban programmes and spatial scenarios. The ‘Glass Video Gallery’, as Tschumi himself called the Pavilion, literally turns the principle of the traditionally enclosed, dark projection room for film, or ‘black box’, inside out, so that what usually takes place in the living room, bar or foyer is brought to the street in an ‘unfolded cinema’.

The exploration of the Pavilion’s boundaries leads to the programming of public space, as the inversion of the definition and form of the Pavilion shifts the event from inside to outside. The Tschumi Pavilion is therefore an explicitly urban intervention. In fact, what happens in the public space around the Pavilion is at least as important as the Pavilion itself. As Tschumi himself put it: ‘Architecture is as much about the event that takes place in a space as it is about the space itself.’

Over a hundred productions

Bernard Tschumi’s Pavilion stood unused on the Hereplein for the first five years after the exhibition, but in 1995, the Stichting Tschumipaviljoen (Tschumi Pavilion Foundation) took over its management, with the aim of using the space to create projects by other artists. Over a hundred projects have now been created there by artists from the Netherlands and abroad. The primary criteria for selecting artists is their ability to create a location-specific project that responds to the qualities of the Pavilion. The projects in the Pavilion are actors explicitly within the public space, which is primarily formed by the Hereplein: one of the busiest central junctions in Groningen, where buses come and go and taxis, cars, cyclists and thousands of pedestrians pass through every day. The projects must have the quality of attracting the attention of this audience, which is constantly in transition, because unlike in museums and/or galleries, the Hereplein doesn’t have an audience that has specifically chosen to view a particular project or exhibition. The diverse programme of location-specific projects, preferably integrating technology and multimedia, activates one’s own urban location in the spirit of Bernard Tschumi. The changing projects always deviate from the programme of video clips that was originally placed in the Pavilion. But just like a church is activated by a boxing match, Bernard Tschumi’s Pavilion is constantly being activated by the varying projects.